Econometa

Along with many many other interesting things that I’ll omit here as off-topic, I heard a lot of good discussion at BAR Camp about microformats.

Beyond their technical usefulness and practicality, microformats are interesting to me because so many of them seem to be centered around de-coupling personal data from application that might use that data. For example:

- hCard represents contact data
- hCalendar represents calendar and event data
- XFN represents friends and social networks
- hReview represents review data (e.g. of a product, restaurant, etc.)
- xFolk represents tagged bookmark data

My focus here is on the economic value of stuff about stuff, and one example of that is that as a user on the internet, a lot of value is resident in the data about you, or the data that you create. If microformats help to separate this data from applications, it becomes easier to put it and its value under the control of the user, where I think it belongs.

Microformats can do more than simply allow users to transfer their data from app to app, though. For public data, microformats enable a new model of application, where user data is crawled, aggregated, and made searchable in the same way that the raw text of web pages are now. So for example:

- A distributed organization’s roster could be listed by crawling hCards
- Attendance at an event could be listed by crawling hCalendar data
- Social networks could be visualized by following XFN data
- Review sites could aggregate user reviews from across the Internet

Right now a lot of the work on microformats seems to center around blogs, but I think that the above ideas could be applicable to most users, not just people who take the time to personally publish a blog. I hope that as things evolve, users who may not be interested in having a blog might nevertheless have an easy way to create and store data on the Internet, and control how it is used by these kinds of applications. It seems to me that this is a big part of the potential of microformats — a standardized way for users to allow access to their data and thus participate in a distributed application.

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